Last Born In The Wilderness

[Intro: 10:27] Professor Alex Vitale, sociologist and author of ‘The End of Policing,’ joins me to discuss the Capitol siege on January 6th, the role the Capitol police played in the event, and the deeply political reasons the police were under-resourced, under-staffed, and completely overwhelmed in the face of the mob.  Prof. Vitale steps outside the narratives that have inevitably emerged in the wake of this event: 1) That the failure to secure the Capitol is due to a lack of police funding and training (meaning we need to beef up policing in a general sense, leading to more legislation to "combat domestic terror" by expanding the surveillance and police state in the US). 2) That the police were "letting" the rioters into the Capitol building and actively cooperating with them (which there are isolated examples of, no doubt, but not in a general sense). These narrow interpretations exclude the true complexities of the event. Prof. Vitale provides deeper context into the ongoing efforts to scale back an